How to Build an eCommerce Tech Stack That Grows with Your Business

A Guide to Selecting Flexible, Future-Proof eCommerce Technologies

Today, a business’s ability to compete in a competitive digital-first landscape largely depends on the state of its tech stack. Have they modernized their legacy systems? Created omnichannel marketplaces? Hired skilled tech talent? Leveraged AI?

In fact, 67% of companies say they are changing or planning to change the architecture of their current commerce platform to prepare for the future, according to Shopify's SaaS Commerce Platforms report.

But if upgrading your e-commerce tech stack was a quick and simple process, every business would be exactly where it needs to be to compete. And with growing pains evident across the sector, I’m confident that this is not the case.

That’s why I’m sharing my insights as someone who has spent years equipping e-commerce businesses with the necessary tech talent to thrive amid constantly developing landscapes.

Let’s discuss the latest trends in e-commerce digital transformation, their implications and limitations, and how to build an e-commerce tech stack that grows with your business.

The Dangers of Doing Too Much, Too Fast

Once you’ve decided your business needs to make a digital upgrade, it can be tempting to go from zero to a hundred in a frenzy of technological transformation.

And even though faster is better in most circumstances, it shouldn’t come at the expense of quality. That’s why, according to a 2023 Forrester report, 30% of digital projects fail in their first year—because organizations try to do too much, too quickly.

In my experience, when businesses get too excited about upgrading to the latest tech, they often lose sight of existing ways they are making money, taking attention and resources away from areas like marketing and customer service, which can slow down revenue and even damage customer engagement.

A business’s eagerness to transform can also lead them to lock themselves into a relationship with a single vendor or platform, perhaps because it’s a big name and not because they’ve taken the time to research their best options.

The Scaling Problem & Embracing “MACH”

Another (arguably related) obstacle e-commerce businesses run into is scalability. A survey by the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that a lack of technology scalability was the second biggest challenge among 1,000 business leaders and their tech stacks.

Scalability can be hard to focus on when it often ends up costing businesses more money up front. For example, acquiring your tech stack through a single large vendor may be cheaper at first, but vendor lock-in limits growth, hindering scalability practically from the start. This is all to say, scalability is an investment.

The IDC survey also found growing preference for a different kind of tech stack, with 45% of the 1,000 companies surveyed utilizing a composable front-end with a full-stack back end—the combination used by e-commerce giants Shopify.

McKinsey has a term for this, which I read about in a recent article of theirs, called MACH development principles.

MACH stands for microservices, API-enabled, cloud-native, and headless (which means that the front-end design and back-end systems are separate). The McKinsey authors credit Amazon for pioneering some of these principles with its focus on API-enabled architectures and microservices. Meanwhile, other successful companies are using open-source technology to piece together scalable and flexible tech stacks, which I wrote about in my last Substack.

In practice, teams working in MACH architectures develop applications made up of small, individual services that communicate via APIs. Meanwhile, the front-end presentation of the application works independently, leaving the rest of the application “headless.” This approach offers more flexibility, independence, and thus, scalability.

Why Going AI-First Is a Must

Successful companies are investing in AI for their tech stacks, with roughly 20% of leaders making gen AI their top priority in e-commerce and 30% of them planning to put more than a tenth of their e-commerce budget toward gen AI in the next year (McKinsey).

Whether they’ve implemented it yet or not, the majority of business leaders agree that genAI is necessary to compete. According to a study by Harvard Business Review and Coveo, 70% of organizations say AI is critical, and 66% see genAI as essential to the success of their e-commerce operations.

I recently wrote about AI-first banking, and the same idea applies in e-commerce—that organizations should assess whether, and to what extent, each task could be completed by AI, and only then decide where they need human talent. This does more than reduce headcounts; it’s a way to stay intentional with your AI use, keeping you and other decision-makers from throwing AI initiatives (and money) at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Then, as AI continues to evolve, businesses can scale their technology and staff accordingly.

Closing Digital Skills Gaps

While a key purpose of an AI-first approach is to scale back human workers, this only raises the stakes of talent decisions—as if closing tech talent and skills gaps wasn’t already challenging enough.

The IDC reports that a lack of digital skills was the most common internal challenge (38%) reported by business leaders when asked about their tech stacks and sales strategies.

This is no surprise to me as someone who’s been in tech recruiting for roughly three decades. The greater the innovation, the greater the gap. That’s why soft skills have become so important—because traits like adaptability and collaboration are some of the only skills tech professionals will always need.

Of course, you can’t make hiring decisions based on soft skills alone. At my firm PTP, we have a five-step hiring process that assesses a candidate’s technical and behavioral skills (you can see all the steps here), along with combining the power of our experienced recruiters and AI technology, matching clients with qualified IT professionals as effectively and efficiently as possible, even taking care of the onboarding process.

Upskilling and reskilling are also popular methods for tech employers, as they aim to close skills gaps without going through the time-consuming, often expensive process of hiring replacement talent. Providing learning and development opportunities for existing employees can also improve engagement and therefore retention.

Conclusion

Growing technology means growing potential for e-commerce businesses, but only if their approach is adaptable. Through service optionality, an AI-first approach, and the right talent strategy, companies can scale smartly, nurturing a tech stack that grows alongside their business.